Transcription
All right, gang. My name is Steve Hunaker. I own a temporary Christmas light business in Arizona. Um, my only goal for this presentation is I want you to leave this presentation, go back this season, and make more money. That's it.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through a few processes and systems that we do in our business that helped us grow. And then I'm gonna give you three things that you can either screenshot or take with you, implement in your lighting business this year, this season, and you'll make more money. You can ask Chris Rios. He's done half of these things and he has made more money.
Uh, I also will go through a few different things here. So, what we're going to cover today, the basics of lead genen, uh, opportunity chasing, meaning like how to actually stay away from spending time selling to turds and actually focus on people who are going to give you money, which in Christmas lights, we all know what I'm talking about. And then we're going to talk about how to how to actually turn completed jobs into more referrals in a strategy that's actually scalable. And then I'm going to give you a few marketing things that you can just take into your business and crank.
So, anytime someone gets on stage, I want to know why I should listen to them. Now, I want you guys to know that's what I think when someone else comes on the stage. And so, this isn't to brag. This isn't to tell you how great I am. This is when I'm sitting there. I want to hear why I should listen to the person talking.
So, I started my temporary lighting business in 2020. I'm out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Uh, COVID year. I was a sales bro. Classic sales douche. Wore a suit every day. Uh, hated it. Started a Christmas light company in 2020. Uh, that first year we did about $97,000 in sales. Fast forward to last year, we did $81,000 in sales. Add an average ticket of $3,835.54. That's 205 residential customers and four commercial. I say that because when we talk about Christmas lights, so many people have so many different models that I want to make sure that I'm super detailed on what our model is so you guys understand the language I'm speaking with Christmas lights. So, we are a leasing model. I'll get back to that as well.
But then I also in the off-season own a company called Home Service Accelerator where all of the processes and systems that I built in my junk removal business for marketing, sales, and scaling and in my Christmas light business. I show other home service businesses how to do it. At the time of this presentation, I've had 350 home service businesses come through the program all over the country. Um, it is my labor of love. It's what I do in the off-season. and I really enjoy it.
So, for Christmas lights specifically, this is geared towards residential installs. I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not. I am not the commercial guy. I don't pretend to be. You can talk to Joe about selling commercial. You can talk to a lot of these other guys that are way more experienced about selling commercial. I am speaking the language of leasing model renting temporary Christmas lights up in October, November, down in January. We sell basic things C9 in the in the summertime we'll sell it for $9.97. Uh, peak season we'll sell it to 12.25 a foot. Uh, string lights we sell anywhere from $49 to $55 a strand. Uh, that's, you know, per we we we do Arizona. It's a lot of small trees, so per strand pricing makes a lot more sense for us. Lit wreaths we sell on the small end $5.95 on the larger ones up to $8.97 for the 60 in. And then we do shimmering spheres and bursts at $59.17 to $69.17 a sphere and we do ground stakes. That's it. I don't do garland. I don't do a lot of the other stuff because I believe that simple scales.
And so what I mean by that is when I get approached and I the one thing I'm willing to kind of concede on is I think we probably should be doing garland. But when I'm running, my goal every single day during temporary lighting business is we have three crews. And each one of those crews should be responsible for installing $5,000 a day. So for us to hit our goals, it's about $15,000 of revenue a day. We don't always hit 15. Sometime we go down, sometimes we go up, but that's the goal. And so what happens for me is maybe it's just because I'm a bad business owner and manager, but I find a lot of trouble once I got that second and third crew going. I had a lot of trouble keeping the quality the level I wanted it to be while also not having just the best guys all on one job. So that's the thing that we struggle with as we scale. So the more simple I make the product offering, the more replicable, replicatable, whatever the word is, the the the solution is to the customer. Does that make sense? It's like if I'm going around, I'm doing reindeer at one house and I'm doing a big inflatable Santa at another one. It's really hard to train, you know, 20 to 30 installers at any time on that. Uh, and it's another thing to actually deal with the service issues that come from so many different things outside of that. Does that make sense? Cool.
So, here's our setup. About 30 active employees in season, 28 are W2s, two are 1099s. The 1099s are my sales guys. If your sales guys don't want to be 1099s, let me spoil it for you. They're terrible salespeople. If your sales guys do not want to be commissionon, they're bad salespeople. com. Good sales people want to have uncapped potential in commissions. So, if you're going out and you're getting your first sales guy and they're like, "Oh, I want a high base." Tell them to kick rocks. Uh, so we we we commission them 6% of new revenue sold, they get a $500 kicker for every $50,000. And then if they hit over $150,000, we give them a $1,000 bonus. I have two admin and office positions. They do, you know, all the clerical work, all that fun stuff. And then I have one director of operations. He runs the entire show. Like I'm talking I don't touch a bulb. I don't talk to an employee in season that's an installer. All of that goes up to him. I manage the managers. So I manage him. I manage the two install leads under him. And I manage the sales team. And then I manage the office staff. His job, the entire business operates under him. And that is probably as you scale up a temporary business, that position is by far the most important position. No, he gets paid handsomely. He gets paid handsomely so he doesn't leave. That's the basic. He gets paid handsomely so that he can go back to his wife and after a hard season of work, he can go buy a house for his family through the business that we made and the business that he operates. So, when I hear people come up and they say like, "Oh, nobody wants to work anymore." I'll tell you, if you if you're paying somebody peanuts, you're going to get a circus animal. If you pay somebody well, you're going to get a really quality product typically from that employee.
So then under him, I have two crew leads. The third crew lead is him. This year we're going to go up to four. And then we have 17 to 20 part-time installers. I made the note that number dwindles as the year goes on. Anybody who's scaled up knows what I'm talking about. Uh, and then worth noting most of these installers are college kids, right? So some of them have Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedules. Some of them have Tuesday, Thursday. We just fill them in.
So, as I go through this, I'm going to go into the stuff that's just going to make you more money and you guys can just take it and run. But, I want you guys to open your minds a little bit to this because I'm going to say some things and some marketing strategies that you might have tried in the past and you don't love the result you got. And so, I love this quote. It ain't about what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's about what you know for sure that just ain't so. One of the biggest examples of this is yard signs. People have put out 20 yard signs before and they're like, "Gh, yard signs don't work." It's like, "Try putting out 2,000 and then tell me they don't work." So, most of the time, the issues we have about some form of marketing thing, some form of sales thing, when people say it doesn't work, it usually wasn't the mechanism that didn't work. It was usually the volume that you put into it that didn't work. Right? So like all of these things work and so usually the variables you just didn't do enough of it.
So this was my presentation at HBL last year was $490,000 in revenue. This is the jobber screenshot. And this was this year $81,000 in revenue. And then there's the top 10 jobs on the side. I redacted their names in case any of you are from Arizona. Don't want you seeing them. Uh, and we've gone into a new warehouse. We have an arena sponsorship and then we opened up our permanent lighting brand this off-season.
So when it comes to lead genen, everybody here just wants their phone to ring more. But once you crack that problem, the next problem that you're going to always have is you've got one or two really good opportunities mixed into with 10 turds, right? Terrible leads. And so what happens is what we do is we stop paying as close of attention and giving the TLC to the good opportunities, the customers with high abilities to pay because we're so inundated with people that are like, "Oh, I was just hoping the Home Depot guy could show up and throw lights on my house for $200." Everybody experienced that, right? It's like you get excited about a job and then you tell them your minimum and they're like, "Oh, I thought it was going to be $300." Raise your hand. Everyone. Everyone got that? Wow. Okay, fantastic.
So, this is basically the only things you need to scale up the marketing of any home service business for the most part, but specifically in a Christmas light business. Meta, Google pay-per-click, good signage, and a really solid referral program. Google Maps SEO and all of that is free. We could talk about that another time, but you can build a massive business off of just that. So, what happens is so many people like myself go on the internet and make a ton of content about this marketing strategy and this marketing strategy and then if you're the owner, you're like, "Dude, I'm I've read or watched videos about 25 different things. I don't even have the time to do any of it." Let me just simplify it for you. The proven and best things that you can do are meta, Google paperclick, and signage for paid and then organic referral campaigns and Google Maps SEO for the free stuff. That's it. But Steve, Angie's great. Thumbtac's great. Next door is great. False. They are not. If you are buying a lead sourced by someone else, you are on the wrong side of the table. This is why Thumbtac and Angie and everyone else are the basically tech companies that sell for, you know, five to 15 times multiples. They don't get that kind of valuation if they're not making stupid money, right? They're making stupid money because they're lead arbitrageing you. They're sourcing a lead themselves and then they're selling it to you for a premium. Whereas if you get really good at sourcing leads yourself through Facebook, Instagram signage campaigns, all that jazz, then you've cut out the middleman.
So for targeting specifically paid ads, this is where I will fight a lot of people on this. This is the strategy that worked for me. I had hired a lot of bad agencies and I'd hired a lot of good agencies in the past. We have a good agency here, One Love Social, but for every good one, there's about a hundred terrible ones and everybody's experienced it. When they would set up campaigns for me, I would say, "Hey, I really only want to run ads in these high-income areas, right?" And the agencies usually are not good business owners. And so they would push back and say like, "Oh, no, no, but we we for the for the algorithm, for everything else, we need to really widen it out. Need to really widen it out because the agency wants to come to you and say, "Oh, I got you so many leads." Right? That's what they're doing. But as a business owner, it's like I would rather have 20 to 30 super high-qualified in the rich area ready to pay leads than 150 messaging conversations that are a complete dog water. Does that make sense? Because when you start to actually start selling these opportunities, you realize that you cannot spend the time necessary on the good ones when you're sifting through all of the bad ones.
So, what I did the year that we jumped from 300K or whatever it was to 500 or 490 was I took the Google pay-per-click campaigns and I took Facebook and I went on Google and I looked up only the highest earning zip codes in my area and I forced the ad algorithms to only shove my ads down the people's throats in those areas. And so what happened was we spent way more in those areas, but we didn't waste our time with the bad opportunities and others. We were spending money so far out that when we triangulated it down into the high income areas, our lead value went up. The every lead that comes in now is pretty dang solid. And so when we go out there, our average ticket goes higher because we're spending more time with them, everything else, right? And so I firmly believe that in terms of paid, Google Paperclick and Facebook are king and will be king in terms of paid ads until proven otherwise.
So here's what we did in Meta last year. I spent $10,884 and we made back $115,000 in sales. There's the screenshots. I always like to provide proof. Um, there's the sales on the right column and then there's the spend and meta on the left. And then this is what we did on Google. We spent $8,130 on Google. We got $45,000 back in sales, a 5.6 ROAS. I will say that number is actually higher, but my tracking was broken last year and the inbound phone calls from Google, we did not track correctly. So, this is just when people submitted a form on a landing page for Google Paperclick. I just never want to come up on stage and exaggerate something. So, I know that that number is probably a lot higher ROAS, but my phone number tracking on the inbound phone calls for Google PaperClick was broken. So, I'm just erring on the side of giving accurate numbers. Does that make sense? Okay, cool.
So, you have to get really good at hearing no from these people because when I hear yes at my model in these high income areas, the yes means a lot more, right? So, if our average ticket is $3,800 and someone comes up to me and says, "Oh, in-person sales does not scale. That does not work." But their average ticket is $1,000 or $1,500. They are right. You are right. If your average ticket is $1,000 to $1,500, going in person to these sales does not make sense. But if you if you focus on the high-income areas only and you build an in-person model to go out there, you will squeeze a lot more value out of those sales. It's basic humanity, right? It's like basic human interaction. If I go out to somebody in person and sell the dream, I know you just wanted the roof line. Happy to give you the roof line quote, but man, those bushes would look amazing. The wreath right there. Let me show you an example of a good wreath. It's very hard to do that over the phone. You can do it. There's a lot of businesses that have reached, you know, seven figures doing phone sales. This is just what's worked for us.
So, here's our numbers. 104 yeses, 212 people got quotes and said no, and 191 inbound leads ghosted us or got disqualified out to the point where we didn't even go out there and make contact. Does that make sense? The other thing that isn't shown in these numbers is we pre-qualify hard on the phone with our minimums. So, when someone calls into my office and they say, "Oh, I want I want Christmas lights on the house." We go through the talk track. Okay, just so you know, we want to be super forthright about this. If you're looking for the neighborhood kid to throw lights on the house, that is not us. If you're looking for the white glove premium service that your neighbors are probably using where you're wondering why everything fits so perfectly and everything's color matched so amazing, that's us. Just to let you know, our minimum is X. You know, $9.99, $1,500, whatever you guys say, those inbound phone calls never make it into this system, right? Because once we're on the phone, we're like, "Okay, cool. You were that's not what you're looking for. Great. Let's move on." So, this is just on people who have submitted or made it past that first that first kind of phone pre-qual. Does that make sense? Cool.
So, that is a lot of rejection. That is a crazy amount of rejection. So this is this is new business this year. So the other part that's making up the rest of the $300K is returners and everything else and upsells from last year. So this is just new 2024 season business. So 104 yeses. That means that we went 104 out of 507, which means that we got money from 20% of our qualified leads. Track it with me. So that means for every yes, a lot of nos. What this did when we changed to the super high-end, super focused on the rich area model is operationally it completely changed the game for us at scale. My guys used to go all over town to the point where they'd be driving 30 minutes west for a job and then 30 minutes east and then whatever else. And once we started to scale, that became a huge problem, right? Because if you're got if you have one crew that's doing, you know, three installs in a day and they're driving 30 minutes apart to each install, that's an hour and a half gone each day of just driving. And so if you look at this map on the right now, I know it's kind of hard to see, but you can see that about 75% of our of our juice comes from this really like it's that little clump on the right. That's about a 5 to 10 square mile area in our dream area. That's where all the money is in Arizona. And so what happens is we will go out to installs where we have a $3,000 install in one day and then in the morning and then we'll have a $5,000 install that is literally 0.5 miles away. And so now the drive time shrunk. So now my labor cost goes down. My business is operating a lot more efficiently. And you start building neighborhood dominance in these markets. And I'm going to show you guys the three things that we do uh organically to start getting these referrals from the neighborhoods and building that organic dominance. But the best way to describe it is change the mindset from shotgun spraying the entire area cuz you're just so desperately trying to chase money and change it to being a sniper. Snipe on the best areas, focus on them, and that works.
So, the sooner, and this was the lesson I had to learn because I'm an arrogant sob, but this is the lesson I had to learn. The sooner you humble yourself and realize that you're not that special and your brand isn't that special in holiday lighting, the better off you'll be. So, for example, in the area that we focus on, we have a pretty good authority that we are the largest purely residential installer in that neighborhood in that little corridor right there, that little Scottsdale, Paradise Valley city. No one else is doing $800,000 in temporary lighting there. I've talked to everybody. We know that if I go to the the neighborhood fries in that area and ask a hundred people if they know who Valley Christmas Lights is, even at that size, the majority of them still have no idea who we are, right? And so because of that, I think what happens so many times is people think that everyone else, the prospects are perceiving them as the white glove service because they believe as the owner that they're the white glove service. And that's just not the case. Most of the time you have to convince these people that you are the white glove service through a lot of different things that you do. It's your branding. It's the way you position quotes. It's the way that your guys show up on time. It's the way your sales guys will call them and offer them a coffee or something on their way or something like that. It's the way that you guys give arrival windows of 30 minutes so you don't constantly show up late. Things like that. Things that differentiate yourself.
So, for pricing, if you want to attract the premium price, you have to understand these people are not buying in the same way that you and I buy things for. This is a I made a TikTok one time where I talked about a $1,600 tree wrap. And it's the only TikTok I've ever had that went viral. And about I would say 300 of the comments were just people saying, "I'm a scumbag. I'm a grifter. I can't believe people would ever pay you that. You're an absolute piece of you know what, fantastic. They are not my target audience. These are some of the comments. People that paid that are dumbasses. There's no way in hell I would hire you to do a nonsense job like that. That's something people do on their own. You're insane. That's crazy. For that price, I would do it myself. Highway robbery." Yet at this stage, last year we had 20, what was it? 203, 204 people, whatever it was. 203 people found value in what we're doing. And so if you focus on the people mad at you saying no, what happens to a lot of installers is they get a few nos and they get a few like, "Oh, your quote was $4,000. This guy offered me $1,500. You guys are a ripoff." And then you get like a little turtle shell. You crawl into your little turtle shell and you go, "Oh, maybe I am ripping people off." And then you don't stick to your guns and then you lower your pricing and then the season ends and you didn't make any money, right? And so because of that, your new favorite word should be no because you know the math. So some people spend $500 at steakhouses. I have a customer that spends $16,000. He's on Arizona Cardinals. He's posts the receipt to flex all the time. That's the kind of customers we want.
So specifically here, I want to talk about what drastically changed in our business from the $490,000 year and the $800,000 year. It's the concept of speed to lead. And so we talk about speed to lead. All I'm talking about is the time it takes from the inbound lead when it comes into your system to the time you gave that prospect the answer that they were looking for. And so speed to lead in its most simple form is someone submits a form on your website, how quickly did you get an appointment scheduled? How quickly did you get a quote scheduled? And if you're virtual quoting, how quickly did you get them that quote in hand? When we focused on that, this is what happened. I saw this chart two years ago and this is from the Harvard Business Review and they talked about service-based businesses that took 24 hours or longer to get back to people compared to businesses that found a way to get back to people in under a minute. The businesses that got back to people in under a minute closed 391% more jobs than the people that took a day. And so you can see it's trending down the entire time. What is happening in that time from inbound lead to when you actually make contact with that customer? Your competitors are also getting asked for quotes. So you think about a person that's going in and be like, I want a quote for my Christmas lights on my house. They go on your Facebook ad, they go on your website, they type in their stuff. What is the next logical step they do after they click submit on your website? Somebody >> they're going to do it again to someone else, right? And they're going to keep going because it's honey, go get three quotes, right? And so if you think about that, over 500, 600 inbound inquiries, if you think about what happens is when I got my response time in under a minute to every single one of these people, a huge lion share of the people who buy for the reasons that our businesses sell, service, speed, quality, whatever else, they got the answer that they were looking for as fast as humanly possible, right? And so what that did was it drastically increased our close rate. It drastically increased our booked meeting estimate rate. And then when we're the first people there and we woo them outside of everybody else, some of my competitors are taking two, three, four days to get back to them. We've already got the deposit and we're rolling, right? And so speed to lead was the massive game changer for us. And so what we did is we implemented this. I'm a Jobber guy. I'm probably going to be uh HBL's new software guy. This is not displacing that product at all. What we did is we got on GoHighLevel. Um I have a white label. It's called SnappyLead. But what this does is this is a timeline for our sales process. So, can you guys see? Is that blurry? Can you read that at all? I'm going to walk you through it. The left column is inbound leads. So, the second a lead comes into our system, it fills in the in the left column. Our goal is not to just immediately rip a sale. Our goal is to move them across our process. So, inbound lead, the second we start talking to them, it is now a hot inbound lead. If they respond to something, it is now hot. We are working as hard as we can to get them scheduled. So the made contact in-person estimate scheduled. We drag them along the process. Now it's in-person schedule made. Then from there the only next step is quote sent waiting for the approval or rip the deposit on site, right? And so this is just this is like every sales organization in the world has this system, right? It's just that's your sales process. Customer comes in, you take them on a date, you tell them how pretty you are, you convince them to give you your money, you go do the job, right? It's just the timeline of the lead the entire time.
So, we had a problem here, though. The ready to buy opportunities were not being were not getting the love they deserved because we would get, you know, 10, 15 leads in the middle of November in a day and my sales guys would come in the next day and they would just start calling 10 inbound leads, right? They just start calling all 10. And it's like praying that somebody answers. So what we implemented was this system. The second that that customer clicks submit on the lead now track with me. The second that customer goes on our website and clicks I want a quote. They give us their info. Our system immediately calls the sales rep assigned to that lead. Or in your guys' case if you don't have sales rep, your office phone rings and it says you have a new lead. Press two to get connected, the system automatically attempts to call that customer, right? So, from a Facebook ad, from website, anything else, the second that they've said, "Yep, I want a quote." Boom. We're we're calling them within a minute. Right? Sales is getting his phone. Press two to get connected. Presses two. It calls the customer immediately. If that customer answers, now we've speed got to them in under a minute. We've scheduled the estimate. Great. If they don't answer, we are immediately and automatically dropping a pre-recorded voicemail that says, "Hey, this is Steve with Valley Christmas Lights. Saw you reached out. Super excited to get you started on your quote. I'm going to shoot you a text. Let me know when a good time to come back is, and we can schedule your appointment." Then the text sends, "Hey Lee, this is Jack with Value Premier Lighting. We left you a voicemail as well. Feel free to reach back out at your earliest convenience, and we'll get started on your quote." Boom. Then good amount of people respond right there. But then we have another automated nurture that two, three hours later says, "Let us know. Happy to help." And then 24 hours after that one, we get another one that says, "Keep us posted. This job sold for $5,000. She responded to the fourth nurture." Right? And so if you look at that at the over the course of an entire sales process, if we know the stats on speed to lead, we know the stats on everything else. How many of your inbound leads do you think you even texted a second time or a third time or a fourth time? Very little. Most of us, including myself two years ago, was just like, "Okay, hopefully the sales guys get a hold of him. Okay, cool. We got a hold of the lady. We're going out there. Great." And they just go on to the next one. And then pretty soon you've got like 50 leads you haven't called in a while cuz it's like the list is getting overwhelming. And so what happens here is the second they respond to this nurture. So the second she said yes, I would like a quote, she gets moved to the hot inbound lead section. So then the sales guys the next day, if this is happening overnight, now they know who to call first. Those are the people that are hot. They're saying like, "Yep, I want this. Great." And so what we what happened when we did that at scale was we just printed money. And so the idea with this is the Christmas funnel is you just take them from inbound lead to the first date to complete the job and then get the referrals. That's it. So it's speed to lead, speed to booked appointment, speed to install. Got me? You could have Grant Cardone running your sales and Alex Hormosi and Dan Kennedy running your marketing. You could have Apple's branding team behind you. If you were taking 24 hours to get back to people or even six, you will get circles ran around you by somebody who has their speed to lead dialed. It's just basic math. It is just basic math. I don't care how good of a marketer or salesperson you are. Getting to getting to people as fast as humanly possible will print money. And you can see it here.
So now that that's being said, the part that I want to have you guys actually take and implement, this is one of the biggest levers we pulled in our business that absolutely transformed our revenue. So when you look at our years in the five years we've been in business, the first year 95% of our business came from paid traffic, right? It was ads with Ashley, it was Google pay-per-click, it was all that because we were a new business, we had to pay for every single thing we did. And then the second year, it was like 80 something percent. So some people were starting to tell their friends maybe Google Maps took off whatever it was. It's about 80 something percent. Third year was in the 70s. Fourth year was in the 60%. Last year 45% of our business came directly from paid ads. Okay? So that $440,000 number. What isn't shown in that number of new sales this year is how many of those actually came from referrals. Right? And so this is how we get referrals. It's called the bird of the feather model. By far the best ROAS you will ever get, ROAS is return on ad spend. The best return on advertising dollars you will ever get in a holiday lighting business is putting branded yard signs in completed jobs yards. Now before you say, "Oh, I'm so fancy. I would never put a sign in people's yards. That's we're white glove." We do it. And we have had one person get upset in two years since doing this. So that's like 390, 400 people. One person's gotten upset. You make it look pretty. You make it look solid. And you don't ask, you tell. So, as our jobs get completed, we tell the client, "Hey, just so you know, we put a yard sign in your yard. If you want to pull it, great. If you want us to come by and grab it, great." Nobody cares because what we've found is a lot of people like to flex to their neighbors that they paid for it in our areas. So, you would think like, "Oh, it looks tacky." What's actually happening is people are like, "I want the neighbors to know I paid for this. That's why it looks so good." Right? And so we did this and $500 worth of signs translated to well over $100,000 in new business. Well over every single job we do this on. So but the key is you don't make it look crappy. You have to make it look nice. You have to make it look good. So we brand it this way. Um, we used Dope Marketing to make these. I'm sure you guys know Dope Marketing. Um, unbelievable ROAS. So that's number one.
The second thing we do is every single time we park our car for a quote or a job, we put this A-frame out. The A-frame combined with the branded vehicle that you have will absolutely change the amount of inbound conversations you have with your crews doing the jobs. Because if you think about like when you think about like convincing somebody that you're worth the money or you're worth the job, there is no greater form of social proof than them seeing your crews doing a good job at the neighbor's house, right? And so that is the hottest your leads will ever be. And so you have to convert on it. And so we have one of these or two in some of our trucks. Sometimes we'll put it at the entrance of the neighborhood and then one right on the butt of the vehicle. So, if like if I'm parked on the curb here, say this is my truck. So, it's parked on the curb. House is on this side. We put the A-frame about halfway into the road. So, not to stop traffic, but it's to look like a safety thing. Wink wink. To look like a safety thing. So, it's like a men at work kind of thing. But what it does is it causes all of the neighborhood traffic to slow down. Take another look at your brand. Oh, the Smiths are doing a Christmas light thing. That makes a lot of sense. That looks great. Honey, I don't want to get on the roof. Let's call them. QR code scanned, right? And so what happens is too, this is more explicitly inviting them to bother your crews. So think about yourself at your house. If like a you know you need a plumber and there's a plumber down the road, you see the guy coming in and out of the house and you're like, I don't want to bother him. I don't know who he is, if he's just a worker, if he could even sell me anything. You usually don't bother him. But if you're explicitly invited to come bother them for a quote, more people will do it. So take the A-frame. It's like the Signaade one. It's like $90. Unbelievable positive ROAS.
The third thing, gift cards to every completed customer to give to their friends. Now, this sounds like, okay, great, Steve. That's fantastic. We'll do some gift cards. Great. The way you execute on this is going to be the difference between why you guys never get any sort of like, hey, we'll give you a $100 kicker if you refer your friends to us, and then no one ever does it. Like, everybody does that, right? We'll give you $100 off next year if you refer your friends. This is what we did to actually incentivize them to do it. So we when we complete a job, we have a little gift bag at the end of the job and the gift bag has our logo on the front and then it has two gift cards and a little one-sheet that explains the Valley Christmas gift card program. The way the gift card program works is we give we just did an install for John Smith, right? So when we give John Smith these gift cards, we write on the gifted by thing on the back, John Smith. And we tell John, "John, give these to your neighbors and friends. Your name is written on the back. That's how we track it back to you. Every single time these get redeemed by your neighbors, by your friends, we're going to send you a $100 gift card to Stake 44. We're going to send you a $100 gift card to Amazon, whatever else. Because if anybody's running marketing at scale, you understand what your customer acquisition cost is. I would pay $100 all day long in a steakhouse gift card knowing that my average ticket is $3,800. I would spend $100 knowing my average ticket was $1,000 to acquire a customer. And then what happens is the $100 gift card that's actually being used. Most of you guys give $100 off if they give you a little pushback on your sales process anyway. Let's be real. So worst case, it's $200 or you build it in somewhere. I don't care how you run your business, but this incentivizes them to get out to the mailbox and give it to the friends, right? It's like, okay, instead of just like, oh, these guys are nice. Oh, I want to I want to help them. This forces their hand. Like, honey, I just got $200 to a steakhouse by giving these out to the neighbors. Like, who wouldn't do that, right? But the thing that is unsung about the gift card campaign is if you have a customer who has already paid you money, guess who their neighbors are? Other people who probably also have money. And so they will be a better sales rep and they will be super pre-qualified because when they give the gift card, the realistic next question the person's going to ask is how much did you guys pay? Right? And so that if that person calls you from the gift card already knowing that, that is a hot lead. And so when your business is scaling, your sales guys will be selling laydowns more often because these people already know what they're getting into. Do you guys see the difference there? Does that make sense? Unbelievable tool. And this works in any home service business. So in Home Service Accelerator, I got window guys doing this. I have plumbers doing this. I have landscapers doing this. I have permanent Christmas light guys doing this. I have bathroom renovation people doing this where the kicker is a $500 gift card because their average tickets are $10 grand. We have HVAC guys. I just interviewed an HVAC guy on my YouTube channel where his kicker is a thousand bucks for referrals because their average ticket's like low five figures. So, they're going to do that math all day long because they know what their customer acquisition cost is. It's no different than me going to you and being like, "Hey, would you would you like a $3,000 install for $100? I'll give it to you right now." It's just that's the math. It's fantastic.
So, if you guys want that gift card, it's on Canva. I've made the template for you. All you do is you can scan this QR code, DM me HBL2025, and it will automatically send you the Canva link to the gift card. All you have to do is slap your logo on it, send it to a print shop, rock and roll. Make sense? There is no reason you should not be doing the gift card campaign, by the way. Like, absolutely no reason. Because if it doesn't work, all you're out on is the cost of the paper to print the gift cards on. That's it. So, it's like, why wouldn't you do it? Even if I'm wrong, if you get one job from this, it's an absolute no-brainer. Thank you, everybody. [Applause]